"Bring awareness to the community?! Can't you see this lifestyle is not welcome here. Why not save yourselves the pain and go to a community where it is accepted!" I like to bring up this quote when talking about horrible of a place this is to live.

Proud of the city for pride awareness? I'm ashamed it wasn't done long ago and that there's even the slightest hint of resistance to the idea of it.

I am firmly of the view that many, many people simply expect "anti-gay" sentiments from a place like Medicine Hat. I have said this before elsewhere, but my wife and I have lived here for 5 years now and we actually get out of the house and interact with people. Neither of us has ever noticed a single negative, intolerant, or even snitty comment, look, or eyeroll all the time we've been here.

The patrons of bars, religious fundamentalists, and high school students aren't the entire population of the city. Sure, there'll be haters. There are haters in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal too. I don't think Medicine Hat is the worst place in Canada by a long shot.

The festival isn't for the haters. It's for those who don't hate and for those who are afraid. Hopefully, this festival will give them one fewer reason to be afraid.

That would certainly be the most desirable outcome. Though the little pessimist in me can't rule out the possibility that some puritanical anti-pride "protesters" make a crass attempt to rain on the...rainbow.

Nevertheless, I am SO proud of my hometown right now (as overdue as it might be) and I hope this event will demonstrate to the Bill Shaws of the world that a great deal of people of this town support our LGBT community. :)

While I support gay pride but doesn't anyone think having a parade for it in a small town like the Hat is unnecessary?

I can bet you that there's probably more roughrider fans in this town than there are LGBT people, but we don't have a rider pride parade do we? That might be a bad example but my point is, the parade is for a small number of people in this population 152 people (according to the article) so far out of of 60,000 or so people?

I'd imagine there's actually quite a few invisible LGBT Hatters, given the stigma of being out and proud. If we use the figure that ~1% of Canadians identify as gay, we could estimate that around 600 gay people live in the Hat.

Of course, you don't have to be gay to support gay rights. The 152 figure from the article is the number of people who had liked the Medicine Hat Pride Facebook page at the time it was published. Currently, it's up to 700 supporters of all stripes.

But regardless of the size of the population, it's pretty flippant to call it unnecessary. Creating a welcoming LGBT-friendly atmosphere, even if it's just for a day, within a city with a largely conservative mindset is absolutely necessary.